Spider Chunks The girl landed on the concrete all twisted up. Drew didn’t like the way her parts jutted out. She didn’t look comfortable. Of course, comfortable was not an issue, since she was dead. Drew lived in the apartment building across from the girl’s. He lived on the first floor and they had a patio. They were lucky, his mother had told him, because first-floor apartments were high-priced real estate. Drew didn’t like it because they were so close to the street. When he was home in the afternoons after school, he often hid in the bathroom. You’re a big boy, his mother would say. You are old enough to be home by yourself. Drew would sit cross-legged in the bathtub with the shower curtain pulled trying to do his multiplication tables. The porcelain was a cool cocoon, the math book open in his lap a shield. Two times two was four, two times three was six, and no one—nothing—was coming to get him. There were no such things as monsters. Boogeymen. Zombies. Sometimes he would use the trains on the shower curtain to help him count. Three green ones times three blue ones made nine trains. And nothing was coming to eat him. When the girl stood on the balcony, the gathering crowd sounded like bees from inside the bathtub. As more and more people massed the bees grew into grumbling elephants, and the sound was their feet as they shifted from side to side. Drew pulled an edge of the curtain to peek around, and the trains rippled. He crept out of the bathtub and went to the sliding glass doors by the patio. This was a dangerous spot, but he wanted to see the elephants, whose grumbling grew louder as he approached the doors. Drew saw no elephants, of course. The crowd gazed up to a single point. Drew stepped out onto the patio, the weathered stones smooth under his bare feet. The girl high on the balcony was the point. Drew gazed up at her, too. She climbed to the rail of the balcony and her floral skirt rippled around her knees. The flowers printed all over the fabric were only dots of color from the street. A spider crawled on the wall that separated Drew’s apartment patio from the one next door. The spider was one of those fat dark ones, with stripes. The kind that jumped. A little green one had crawled up his leg once. The green ones were harmless, just garden spiders. Drew had yelled and jumped and swatted at it. He had heard of spiders in Africa that could run ten miles per hour. He didn’t know how fast a human could run but he was sure those kinds of spiders could outrun you. Any spider that could run faster than you, he was also sure, could take a massive bite out of you. Huge chunks of your body, until there was no more of you left. Death by spider mouthfuls. This was not preferable to jumping from a balcony. A gasp swept through the crowd, the pulling in of breath like a giant vacuum. Drew looked up to see the girl falling. Her flower skirt shuddered in the wind blowing past her, and her bright red hair flew up as if reaching for the balcony. Then she was twisted up on the sidewalk. The girl was pretty. Even with her broken bones. Brilliant red tresses framed her ashen face, which matched the concrete. She looked like a coloring book with only the hair filled in. Grey face, grey sidewalk, red hair. He heard that people left notes. If he jumped from a balcony, he would leave a note. In his head he wrote the girl’s note for her: “Dear Ma and Pa, I’m sorry. I love you but this world was too much. I did not want to be eaten by spiders.” Sharks would take chunks out of you. Drew knew that because he watched Discovery Channel. Sharks ate dolphins and fish and seals. Humans were supposed to be at the top of the food chain but that wasn’t counting monsters, Boogeymen, and Zombies. Anyway sharks could eat people, too. Drew had seen a seal washed up on the beach once, but there were no chunks out of it. The seal was smooth. It was like the way glass becomes smooth when the ocean rolls over it again and again. The seal rolled over again and again in the sand. One way with the wave rushing up. The other way with the wave rushing down. The seal was perfectly fine, except for the fact that it was dead. No jutting bones like the red-haired girl. He did not know why the seal was dead, if a shark had not taken chunks out of it. Drew was still holding his math book. He lifted it up and slammed it into the wall. The squished spider left legs on the wall and legs on his math book. Here he could kill a spider. Maybe those 10-mile-per-hour running ones didn’t really exist. Maybe the monsters weren’t real either, as his mother kept saying. He could be the top of the chain. Or he could step out of the food chain at any time, if he liked. Squish a spider. Make a choice. Climb a balcony. Zombies could not get him then. The high wail of sirens from far away could be an ambulance, but it was too late. The crowd began to disperse. Drew stepped back inside and locked the glass patio doors. He returned to the bathroom to wipe the spider remains into the toilet with a piece of toilet paper. Then he left the monsters—and the Boogeymen, and the zombies—in the cool porcelain behind the shower curtain, and Drew settled down to do his multiplication tables at the dining table.